Emily Fertig

Emily Fertig is a Postdoctoral Associate in Engineering Systems at MIT, where she researches decision making under uncertainty in climate policy. Her work seeks to capture flexibility in decision making and evolving states of knowledge in a tractable modeling framework, producing actionable results for policy makers. While she currently focuses on climate mitigation decisions, her previous work examined R&D investment decisions in low-carbon energy technologies in anticipation of a large-scale climate policy. Principal methods of this research include real options and stochastic dynamic programming.

Emily obtained her Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013. Her dissertation is entitled “Facilitating the development and integration of low-carbon energy technologies,” and the bulk of it examines wind power integration through the use of large-scale energy storage and long-distance interconnection of wind plants. Her graduate work was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and she spent a year at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology through NSF’s Nordic Research Opportunity, researching the potential for Norwegian hydropower to help integrate wind power in Germany.

Originally from Alexandria, VA, Emily has a B.A. in Geosciences from Williams College and has interned for both the Deputy Editor of Life Sciences at AAAS/Science and the Scientific Integrity division of the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists.